Critic Quotes

If the equality of individuals and the dignity of man be myths, they are myths to which the republic is committed.

He that peruses Homer, is like the traveller that surveys mount Atlas; the vastness and roughness of its rocks, the solemn gloominess of its pines and cedars, the everlasting snows that cover its head, the torrents that rush down its sides, and the wild beasts that roar in its caverns, all contribute to strike the imagination with inexpressible astonishment and awe. While reading the Aeneid is like beholding the Capitoline hill at Rome, on which stood many edifices of exquisite architecture, and whose top was crowned with the famous temple of Jupiter, adorned with the spoils of conquered Greece.

A song to the oak, the brave old oak,
Who hath ruled in the greenwood long!

Never tell a young person that something cannot be done. God may have been waiting centuries for someone ignorant enough of the impossible to do that very thing.

Madness is always fascinating, for it reveals the ungluing we all secretly fear: the mind taking off from the body, the possibility that the magnet that attaches us to a context in the world can lose its grip.

Molly Haskell
Molly Haskell
Any photographer worth his/her salt - that is, any photographer of professional caliber, in control of the craft, regardless of imagistic bent - can make virtually anything look good. Which means, of course, that she or he can make virtually anything look bad - or look just about any way at all. After all, that is the real work of photography: making things look, deciding how a thing is to appear in the image.

The true use of Shakespeare or of Cervantes, of Homer or of Dante, of Chaucer or of Rabelais, is to augment one's own growing inner self.... The mind's dialogue with itself is not primarily a social reality. All that the Western Canon can bring one is the proper use of one's own solitude, that solitude whose final form is one's confrontation with one's own mortality.

Let a single completed action, all in one place, all in one day, keep the theatre packed to the end of your play.

Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux
Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux
Among the admirable American expressions which enter our language from time to time to lend it new vitality, there is one which I would have every audience, and every lecturer, use at the end of every lecture or course: So what? What does all this amount to.

The word "Silence" today sounds "bridegroom" or the "tragedy of love".

At about six in the morning of July 3, 1860, while I was watering my petunias, and thinking of nothing in particular, I perceived coming towards me, a tall, beardless, fair-haired young fellow, wearing a German cap and gold-rimmed spectacles.

It is science that brings us an understanding of the true complexity of natural systems. The insights from the science of ecology are teaching us how to work with the checks and balances of nature, and encouraging a new, rational, limited-input, environmentally sound means of vineyard management that offers a third way between the ideologically driven approach of Biodynamics and conventional chemical-based agricultural systems.

There once was an old man of Lyme
Who married three wives at a time,
When asked 'Why a third?'
He replied, 'One's absurd!
And bigamy, Sir, is a crime!'

William Cosmo Monkhouse
William Cosmo Monkhouse
The cinema gives us a substitute world which fits our desires.

Though the clown is often deadpan, he is a connoisseur of laughter.

We will indulge in all those miscellaneous commercial operations, which when conducted on a small scale are called thieving, but a large scale, financing.

If the soup had been as warm as the wine;
if the wine had been as old as the turkey;
and if the turkey had had a breast like the maid,
it would have been a swell dinner.

Duncan Hines
Duncan Hines
When a language creates – as it does – a community within the present, it does so only by courtesy of a community between the present and the past.

Never work for a liberal employer, dear boy, they'll sack you on Christmas Eve.
Learned at his father's knee

It is one thing to do your dance on a beach and quite another to collaborate intimately with the sand.

Sometimes, the shortest path between two points is serpentine,

Morn on the waters, and purple and bright Bursts on the billows the flushing of light O'er the glad waves, like a child of the sun, See the tall vessel goes gallantly on.

On me, on me
Time and change can heap no more!
The painful past with blighting grief
Hath left my heart a withered leaf.
Time and change can do no more.

Perhaps the old literacy of words is dying and a new literacy of images is being born. Perhaps the printed page will disappear and even our records be kept in images and sounds.

No writer or speaker who ignores the roots of Latin derivatives is secure from egregious error.